Since brevity is the soul of ambiguity as well as wit, newspaper headlines continually provide us with amusing samples.

Lexical ambiguity can be addressed by algorithmic methods that automatically associate the appropriate meaning with a word in context, a task referred to as word sense disambiguation.

Lexical ambiguity is contrasted with semantic ambiguity.

Simone de Beauvoir tries to base an ethics on Heidegger's and Sartre's writings ( The Ethics of Ambiguity ), where she highlights the need to grapple with ambiguity: " as long as philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it ... And the ethics which they have proposed to their disciples has always pursued thre same goal.

F. Scott Fitzgerald uses the latter type of ambiguity with notable effect in his novel The Great Gatsby.

Christianity and Judaism employ the concept of paradox synonymously with ' ambiguity '.

* a lack of vowel marking ( often with ambiguity between no vowel and a default inherent vowel ),

* vowel marking for a short or neutral vowel such as schwa ( with ambiguity between no vowel and that short or neutral vowel ),

Where there is ambiguity, long and short alpha are sometimes written with a macron and breve today: Ᾱᾱ, Ᾰᾰ.

Thus something as simple as a newspaper might be specified to six levels, as in Douglas Hofstadter's illustration of that ambiguity, with a progression from abstract to concrete in Gödel, Escher, Bach ( 1979 ):

The term octet was defined to explicitly denote a sequence of 8 bits because of the ambiguity associated at the time with the term byte.

To avoid the ambiguity of the term British, and to more emphatically associate the team's identity with both the United Kingdom and Ireland, from the 2001 tour of Australia the name British and Irish Lions has been used.

Other terms with this type of ambiguity are: satisfiable, true, false, function, property, class, relation, cardinal, and ordinal.

Terms with systematic ambiguity may be written with subscripts denoting that one level of meaning is considered a higher priority than another in their interpretation.

The crucial differences with the previous wave can be seen in the downward shift in melodies, increasing durations of movements, the acceptance of Mozart and Haydn as paradigmatic, the greater use of keyboard resources, the shift from " vocal " writing to " pianistic " writing, the growing pull of the minor and of modal ambiguity, and the increasing importance of varying accompanying figures to bring " texture " forward as an element in music.

The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia includes objects up to 25 Jupiter masses, saying, " The fact that there is no special feature around 13 MJup in the observed mass spectrum reinforces the choice to forget this mass limit ," and the Exoplanet Data Explorer includes objects up to 24 Jupiter masses with the advisory: " The 13 Jupiter-mass distinction by the IAU Working Group is physically unmotivated for planets with rocky cores, and observationally problematic due to the sin i ambiguity.

Although some consider Lang's work to be simple melodrama, he produced a coherent oeuvre that helped to establish the characteristics of film noir, with its recurring themes of psychological conflict, paranoia, fate and moral ambiguity.

T. S. Eliot's use of a quotation from Heart of Darkness —" Mistah Kurtz, he dead "— as an epigraph to the original manuscript of his poem The Hollow Men contrasted its dark horror with the presumed " light of civilization ," and suggested the ambiguity of both the dark motives of civilization and the freedom of barbarism, as well as the " spiritual darkness " of several characters in Heart of Darkness.

Impalement replaced the earlier dimidiation – combining the dexter half of one coat with the sinister half of another – because dimidiation can create ambiguity between, for example, a bend and a chevron.

In some circumstances handfasting was open to abuse, with persons who had undergone " troth-plight " occasionally refusing to proceed to a church wedding, creating ambiguity about their former betrothed ’ s marital status.

As long as we can measure the position of each particle with infinite precision ( even when the particles collide ), there would be no ambiguity about which particle is which.

Genesis 10: 21 refers to relative ages of Japheth and his brother Shem, but with sufficient ambiguity to have given rise to different translations.

Academics such as Thomas Alured Faunce argue that the insertion of a constructive ambiguity such as valuing innovation in bilateral trade agreements ( and then according normative and ongoing lobbying power to such textual negotiating truces by formally linking them with non-violation nullification of benefits provisions ) may undermine democratic sovereignty with regard to construction of domestic policy, particularly in areas such as the environment and public health.

Its portrayal of violence and ambiguity in regard to moral values, and ‘ shock ’ ending, divided critics.

Due to the ambiguity over the source of individual items derived from gelatin, many Orthodox rabbis regard it as generally being nonkosher.

In paper writing one may not distinguish the 0 and O at all, or may add a slash across it in order to show the difference, although this sometimes causes ambiguity in regard to the symbol for the empty set.

JML provides semantics to formally describe the behavior of a Java module, preventing ambiguity with regard to the module designers ' intentions.

The number of distinct glyphs was reduced tremendously at the cost of increased ambiguity.

This ambiguity of character was further exacerbated by his remoteness, and as he grew older, he increasingly displayed a preference for solitude, which may have stemmed from his isolated upbringing.

The Trojan Women for example is a powerfully disturbing play on the theme of war's horrors, apparently critical of Athenian imperialism ( it was composed in the aftermath of the Melian massacre and during the preparations for the Sicilian Expedition ) yet it features the comic exchange between Menelaus and Hecuba quoted above and the chorus considers Athens, the " blessed land of Theus ", to be a desirable refugesuch complexity and ambiguity are typical both of his ' patriotic ' and ' anti-war ' plays.

Due to its ambiguity, the letter was a cause of debate during the British and later American struggles over the abolition of slavery.

The ambiguity in his belief in religion mirrored the dichotomies between his public and private lives: Stephen Ingle wrote that it was as if the writer George Orwell " vaunted " his atheism while Eric Blair the individual retained " a deeply ingrained religiosity ".

There is debate as to whether Samoa is / was an elective monarchy or an aristocratic republic, given the comparative ambiguity of the title O le Ao o le Malo and the nature of the head of state's office.

Because of the ambiguity surrounding Louis Napoleon's political positions, his agenda as president was very much in doubt.

There was ambiguity in their ideas as to where to draw a line on " species ", " created kinds ", and what events and lineages fall within the rubric of microevolution or macroevolution.

Though he did vote against the admission of Missouri as a slave state, and though he would be the nominated presidential candidate of the Free Soil Party, an anti-slavery political party, in 1848, there was no ambiguity in his position on the abolition of slavery during his term of office.

Beginning with Windows 2000, a header was defined which specifies multiple audio channel data along with speaker positions, eliminates ambiguity regarding sample types and container sizes in the standard WAV format and supports defining custom extensions to the format chunk.

Handling this ambiguity was an early problem of the theory, reflecting the modern use of both Boolean rings and Boolean algebras ( which are simply different aspects of one type of structure ).

It was meant to also reduce ambiguity, and to support the Russian language in addition to Mongolian.

Writer – director Robin Hardy has stated that the ambiguity was intentional, but that fans of The Wicker Man will immediately recognise Lee's character as Lord Summerisle.

Newman believed the score helped move the film along without disturbing the " moral ambiguity " of the script: " It was a real delicate balancing act in terms of what music worked to preserve.

The Grand Union Canal was also the original name for part of what is now part of the Leicester Line of the modern Grand Union: this latter is now generally referred to as the Old Grand Union Canal in order to avoid ambiguity.

Major-General J. Davidson, Director of Operations at GHQ wrote in a memorandum that there was " ambiguity as to what was meant by a step-by-step attack with limited objectives " and suggested reverting to a 1, 750 yard advance to increase the concentration of British artillery.

About Amalric's son Baldwin IV, however, " there was no ambiguity ".

To add further ambiguity to the title, Archbishop Bourdin was declared excommunicate by the Pope in April of 1117, before Pentecost but after Easter.

Furthermore, Fett " is cool because he was designed to be cool ", presenting a " wicked ambiguity " akin to John Milton's portrayal of Satan in Paradise Lost and Iago in William Shakespeare's Othello.

It was more likely a result of ambiguity between hiem and him etc.

Under a rule forbidding distribution of the joint possessive, writing " Jason and Sue's children than " Jason's and Sue's children " died in the crash " eliminates the implication that Jason lost children of whom Sue was not the mother, but it introduces ambiguity as to whether Jason himself was killed.